WCP1664

[1]

About 35 years ago Dr. Wallace built a house at Godalming¹ upon a plot of ground w[hic]h adjoined that upon w[hic]h our² house stood. When the house was completed, ³he & his family took up their residence at Godalming, & continued in the same house until they removed to Parkstone⁴ a few years later. I was at that time an assistant master at Charterhouse School; & Dr. Wallace become acquainted with a few of the masters besides myself. With two or three of them he had regular weekly games of chess; for he was then & for long afterwards very fond of that game; &, I understand, (I am not a chess-player myself) possessed considerable skill at it. A considerable portion of his spare time was spent in his garden, in the management of w[hic]h Mrs Wallace, also, had much knowledge & experience, & very cordially assisted him. Here his characteristic energy & restlessness conspicuously displayed themselves. He was always designing some new feature, some alteration in a flower-bed, some special environment for a new plant; & always he was confident that the new scheme w[oul]d be found to have all the perfections that ^w[hic]h the old ones lacked. From all parts of the world botanists and collectors sent him, from time to time, rare or newly discovered plants, bulbs, roots, or seeds, w[hic]h he, with the help of Mrs Wallace's practical skill & insight into the gardening art, w[oul]d try to acclimatise, & to persuade to grow somewhere or other in his garden or conservatory.

But it never seemed to occur to him that these old schemes had once been themselves new, & had been regarded by their contriver with the same paternal prejudice of [2] (2 perfection as the present ones. Nothing disturbed his cheerful confidence in the future; & nothing made him happier than some plan for reforming the house, the garden, the kitchen-boiler, or the universe. And truth to say he displayed great ingenuity in all of these enterprises of reformation.

Although they were never in effect what they were expected to be by their ingenious author, they were often sufficiently successful; but, successful or not, he was always confident that the next w[oul]d turn out to be all that he expected of it. With the same confidence he made up his mind upon many a disputable subject; but, be it said, never without a laborious examination of the necessary data, & the acquisition of much knowledge; & this confidence always lead [sic] him to propose practical measures for meeting difficulties & overcoming mischiefs with little or no hesitation, nor doubt as to their efficacy.

In argument, of w[hic]h intellectual exercise he was very fond, he was a formidable antagonist. His power of handling masses of details & facts, & of showing their inner meaning & the principles underlying them, & ^of making them intelligible, was very great; & very few men of his time had it in equal measure. But the most striking feature in his conversation was his masterly application of general principles: these he handled with the natural skill that goes with genius, & is in truth, one of the surest signs of its presence. In any particular subject of w[hic]h he might happen to possess a competent knowledge, & especially in any subject of w[hic]h he might happen to possess a competent knowledge, & especially in any subject of w[hic]h he was a master, he w[oul]d solve, or suggest a [3] (3 plausible solution of, difficulty after difficulty, by immediate reference to fundamental principles & considerations, w[hic]h the ordinary man habitually loses sight of when confronted with, & reduced to confusion by, the apparently inexplicable. This w[oul]d give his conclusions a weight, & an appearance of inevitableness, w[hic]h usually overbore his adversary; & even if it did not convince him, left him without any effective reply. And, doubtless, it was the possession in rare perfection of these two qualities of intellect w[hic]h gave him that confidence in the efficacy of his reforming plans, both for things in particular & for things in particular general, w[hic]h was a remarkable feature in his character. This, too, had a good deal to do, I am disposed to conjecture, with another very noticeable characteristic of his, w[hic]h often came out in conversation; & that was his apparently unfailing confidence in the goodness of human nature. No man nor woman but he took to be in the main honest & truthful, & undesigning of anything but was honourable & honestly intended; & no amount of disappointment, nor even losses of money & property, incurred through this belief in others' virtues, had any effect in altering this feature in his character. To him it was foolishness, even in practical affairs, to conceive of mankind mainly under the categories of error. But it was sometimes with unfortunate results to himself that he insisted upon applying this principle to all individuals without exception.

[4] (4 His intellectual interests were widely extended, very unusually so, in fact; & he once confessed to me that they were agreeably stimulated by novelty & opposition. An uphill fight in an unpopular cause, for preference a thoroughly unpopular one, or an argument in favour of a the generally despised thesis, had charms for him that he coul^d not resist. In his later years, especially, the prospect of writing a new book, great or small, upon any one of his favourite subjects, always acted upon him like a tonic, & that to an extraordinary extent; only to be equalled by the prospect of building a new house & of laying out a new garden, & of abandoning the old ones to a tenant or purchaser. And in all this his sunny optimism & his unfailing confidence in his own person went far towards & securing him success.